I’m skipping the end of the story.
A cabaret singer, a jazz singer, and a pop singer all walk into a bar, set up shop, and start performing. (It’s not a joke…unless you’re a trumpet player.) So. Which one is the “jazz singer”? What’s the tell?
Define: jazz vocalist. Name the perfect “prefect” present or perhaps past imperfect apropo of said adjective and noun.
The vocalist: It’s a consistent argument on the jazz front. The role in itself — and, at times, it seems a role — can even seem an affront in the jazz world. The very fact that one is a vocalist conjures a hierarchy in the minds of musicians. What diminishes a vocalist more than to say that he or she is “just a singer”? Especially when considering the human voice is the single most primal of instruments, the first thing you hear in the womb…and, most likely, out of the womb, prima facie — lullabies. Maybe that’s why female vocalists…well… I suppose everybody has at least one favorite female vocalist. Or not.
So… is it the voice alone? Or are words important? In the jazz “realm” of vocal styling, scatting is almost considered a duty to prove one’s jazz worth in notage wattage. Both jazz vocalists and instrumentalists use standards as script from which to improvise. Why should vocabulary matter much? Merely an archaic device used to convey…a story?
So many female vocalists fronting big bands served as focal points for an audience to peruse and pursue, but not as players. Females are supposedly superior in the language and communication department — (little) boys (blue) blow their horns — girl(s) talk — I’m generalizing, folks — a natural connection with a broad(er) audience, so to speak.
I’m trying to spell out what is responsible for an obvious gender gap in jazz instrumental playing. It’s not that females are incapable of playing instruments. Witness one Marian McPartland. Is it the fact that money and on-tour sleeping accommodations are tight, therefore dresses should be, too? What’s with the assumption that everyone wants to see the femme voix posed in the little black dress or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof to prove jazz worthiness…HIT or MISS, depending, not on the length of one’s appoggiatura, but on the curve of one’s legs or décolletage. (Artie) Pshaw! Maybe it isn’t as applicable anymore… uh, forget I said that… check out contemporary CD covers…when you’re a cabaret singer that isn’t Mabel Mercer, you have to have a coterie of gowns to satisfy code. Oh! You play piano? Start singing for your supper. That’s how Carmen McRae hit it. Nina Simone. Lee Wiley… Manhattan’s Lady of Jazz, from whom many took notes, said “singing includes a number of things … aside from the voice … these girls who are trying to get up on the bandstand at forty years old … doesn’t make any sense to me.” — WHY, LEE, I OUGHTTA…take more notes? Oh, Susannah! I hope you didn’t fall for that…but, as I said — I’m avoiding the end of this story.
Let’s branch left and talk about a logophile who’s surely on the list of a few audiophiles … Susannah McCorklle. She was not a singer’s singer in the way that Sarah Vaughan is held up as vocal virtuosity made corporeal, technically proficient and capable of crescendo and da capo aria, trill and verily full of grace note…nor did she possess the lead crystalline purity and quicksilver fluidity and fluctuation of Ms. Ella. But…
Susannah Mccorkle wasn’t one to split the difference between portamento, and port de voix. She knew there wasn’t one. She could tell you from which romance language each spelling sprang.
A librettist’s logician, she was an interpreter of languages who chose to become an interpreter of song. Language floated her presentation, you know what I meme?
Branching right — back to the beginning. An American in Paris, Ms. Mccorkle was seeking refuge from herself. Said refuge appeared in the form of comic book readin’ Billie Holiday captured within the lines of a recording. Upon discovering Billie, Susannah metamorphosed from chrysalis into a gold lamé butterfly. Her semes stressed a yarn spun from the perfect passive participle into a glamorous exterior that wove coquettishness and scholarship into the perfect piano foil.
Is cabaret and gold lamé the refuge of “bruised romantics”? People magazine’s apt description of Ms. McCorkle received no academic argument from her life’s thesis: romance (choose your preposition) language. Jazz… is it the refuge of the erudite? Harris Tweed may cut a fine figure on a scholar, but not on a female vocalist. Standards and evening gowns level the playing field. Anyone can sing the tune, but it takes a custom cut to make a song your signature.
Ether – you have it, or you don’t. Ms. McCorkle did. A rarified substance that rolled and tumbled, and refined with distinction words too marvelous for simply speaking, Her lightly languorous speaking voice defined her vocal. To hear her speak was to hear her sing. Like glass polished by waves and tide, no edges, smooth syntax texture and muted emotional color. The depth of the words drawing the gravitational tide of a story line. Present, perfect: The Waters of March. Wading in Portuguese, Susannah translated many a bossa nova tune on her own accord.
It’s only words —palavras –- palabras — paroles — but, Ms. Mccorkle made words count. Rumplestilskin couldn’t demand a much better woven tale. No accident that she also translated her considerable knowledge of composers and language into workshops for children as a means of spreading the wealth. A woman of exacting standards would not be a misnomer. Ms. Mccorkle, alluringly marmish, indulged and extricated immense knowledge from what she loved. She loved learning everything about her favorite composers. Her mother was a school teacher: Her father an anthropologist: Her sister a geologist. With the roots of severe and chronic biochemical imbalance entwined in her family tree, this was a family that gist knew too much. Performing ultimately became her refuge from knowing herself. Show and tell, she ran away to join other egg-headed introverts hiding onstage in plain view.
Word value displaced note value in our subject’s sentence diagram. A mordent was not intrinsic to Mccorkle’s mortar of
tune construct. Idiomatically speaking…she was the epitome of a cabaret artist, and to many, her solid, unadorned treatment of standard classics rendered her a jazz chanteuse, as well. Perhaps musical phyla just help to put an artist in a box set. Since we listeners don’t quite know the difference between cabaret, jazz, and pop, somebody has to tell us what it is…
tune construct. Idiomatically speaking…she was the epitome of a cabaret artist, and to many, her solid, unadorned treatment of standard classics rendered her a jazz chanteuse, as well. Perhaps musical phyla just help to put an artist in a box set. Since we listeners don’t quite know the difference between cabaret, jazz, and pop, somebody has to tell us what it is…
She researched, and skillfully learned the vernacular, verbal syntax and semantics of myriad languages, bringing story and fact to life. If Betty Carter took tone to task and bent the morpheme and never phoned in a phoneme, Susannah took notes to notation through character, inflection, borne of the canons of composers such as Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Mercer, and Jobim.. Punctuation spoke volumes in her book. Is conceptualization the carat worth of cabaret? A smoky, provocative voice… jazz? No, cabaret? Pop? A voice is much more accessible than Miles Davis and his famous back. Is speaking directly within song to one’s audience in clear, accessible, phonetically correct syntax —too plebian? Too straightforward …maybe. Birds have syntax. Songbirds talk.
In the animal kingdom it is considered a show of aggression to stare down one’s audience. In “show business” it’s called selling a song. The business of show is like no business anyone would care to know. If it doesn’t make dollars, it makes no sense. An actuary would consider it paradoxical to sell a song from the heart. There’s No Business Like Show Business… instead of a celebration, a lament. Another McCorlke pearl.
Susannah was probably at her most natural on stage. She didn’t do gimlet eye. Her audience responded to her wares because she sang simply, turning a phrase with conviction. It was a role she relished because it held endless possibilities with comforting boundaries. She could hold out her arms to feel the love, to instruct, and still have her space. The protocol suited her. Now more near ourselves than we … is a bird singing in a tree.* From that tree, quintessential NYC Susannah grabbed the apple, and like Snow White, took a bite.
Too smart to be just a singer, she could feel her control of that role becoming less defined, and if there was anything Ms. McCorkle couldn’t stand for, with or without a microphone — it was being sentenced to a life lacking definition. Without it, life, in all its’ chaotic connotation defied classification. McCorkle was all about class, the gentlewoman scholar with the soothing diction and nary a rough turn of phrase. She literally couldn’t find the words in real life. She found them, instead, in the lyrics of her favorite librettists, giving them their synonymous due in the sheen of Klieg lights, pearls polished and cast.
I’m skipping to the middle…
Ms. McCorkle contributed to the prestigious O. Henry Prize Stories with her own, Ramona By the Sea. Past perfect literary company included the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Woody Allen, Katherine Anne Porter, David Foster Wallace, John Updike, Alice Walker, Saul Bellow …
No gold lamé required.